~ Sunday, April 1, 2001 ~

 

12:31 p.m. Ah, the silly, stretched-out day. Is it earlier or is it later? Where am I? Ah, the changeover of the clocks. And yes, even the grid for the month has changed ... and we all know that Change is Good, right? Good.

The theme for this month is water, and today is an overcast day, with heavy wet clouds lowing and cooling off the air and the ground beneath our feet and the very air we breath is fluid, changeable.

11:07 p.m. Well, the day has certainly shot by, even faster than you can imagine. One minute it was later than I thought and the next minute Mulder was on and then, unsatisfyingly, the X-Files, was over, again. And it will never really be the same with Mulder, moldering or not.

Back from the dead? I don't think so. The show just sort of stumbles along now, like the Frankenstein zombie that it is. Sometimes you really can't go home -- you've got to move along.

Still, I for one, am ecstatic that Spring is finally here. I want the thrill of these longer days, and I've already begun to make the obligatory Big Plans that come with all this newly emergent energy.

Tomorrow I'm going to start another diet. I'm outlining yet another novel. I may, or may not, open the big tub of paint.

If this all sounds amazingly predictable and yet somehow sad, well I say: welcome to my life. I wouldn't have to diet if I hadn't failed to complete the last one. I wouldn't have to start a new outline if I'd managed to complete the last one. Painting? We all know that's never completed.

So my life is a series of starts and stops, big failures and small successes, and yet I've not been stopped. No authority has arrested me for my failure to yield. I've failed at literally hundreds of diets over the years, and yet I still try again, and this time -- this time I think it will work. What does that say about my strange capacity for hope? Or self-delusion?

And the novel: wouldn't I know by now that each and every time I start a new one, I either finish it and put it in a box or I fail to finish it and cannibalize its innards and then I actually alphabetize those same innards, carefully stockpiling all the thoughts I thought so highly of just before I ran out of hope.

Again, with the insane hope. It is springing up again. This time I'll get it right. This time I'll stick with it. This time I'll pull through the muck and the mist and the mess in the middle and this time when I hit the wall I will pause, take a deep breath, and I will scale it. Yes, I will.

That's what Spring will do to a person. It is so nice to look at the beginning of something instead of the end of things, for a change.